From Retail to Farming: The Long Reach of AI

“Is any industry beyond the long reach of Artificial Intelligence?” asks the experience management company Qualtrics. Of course, this question would seem to answer itself. Farming, education, retail and even mining, they point out, have already been touched by the long reach of AI.

In a recent white paper, Qualtrics asked 250 market research decision makers a simple question: How much do you believe AI will impact industry? The overall answer, as both younger and older researchers attested, is positive.

Overall, 93 percent see an opportunity in the reach of AI rather than a threat. And 80 percent think AI will make a positive impact on the market-research industry. In addition to that, AI will begin replacing some human jobs. The question is whether that’s a bad thing.

At least some jobs will be outsourced. It’s often necessary to have machines do the kind of thinking that our brains aren’t capable of. As such, statisticians, research analysts, data scientists and market analysts may become extinct — but market researchers are not necessarily endangered. Those market researchers are us, Capture Higher Ed.

Advanced data analysis is expected to take over the industry outright — but it will also enhance data quality. Surveyed market researchers expect AI to have a “significant impact” in only five years — 90 percent, in fact. Three-quarters think that the data produced by AI will be more accurate than we have today.

Here’s a strange fact: Only about half of those surveyed even know what AI is. At Capture, we know what it is — it is woven into everything we do. We know, too, that as professionals, instituting AI in our software allows us more time to research and more time to check AI for accuracy.

The long and short of it, in reflecting on this survey, is that AI can do the work so you don’t have to. Actually, come to think of it, AI can do the work so we don’t have to. After all, by designing an AI system to locate students, using methods that might tax our brains, it can actually open us up to really utilizing the data we get.

And those are savings that get passed along to you.

By Sean Hill, Senior Content Writer, Capture Higher Ed